THE PENNINGTON MIGHTIER THAN THE BARD

DEEP in a Herefordshire
forest stands a 20-ton hunk of limestone which bears an extraordinary tribute to
Patrick Gordon-Duff-Pennington’s way with words.

When the local woodland
committee wanted a suitable inscription for their millennium feature, they asked
the people of Stoke Lacy for their ideas. Some suggested a verse from John
Clare, others proposed a stanza of Shakespeare, while a few residents thought
that only a Biblical extract would do.

In the end, however, they went for
a slightly less celebrated scribe: the man they call Patrick of the Hills. Six
lines from his composition on the trees of the Western Isles were duly carved
into the stone, and they now act as a welcoming message to all who set foot in
Netherwood.

Today I am spending a couple of hours in the company of the
man whose name is so long it almost needs a sentence of its own. When I called
him to arrange our meeting, he confessed to being “a little nervous”. Could it
be true that the man who saw off the great romantic, the Bard, and even the
Almighty, is afraid of the humble journalist?

“Not really,” he smiles,
easing into a chair. “I’ve worked with journalists for 40 years and most of them
are terribly nice. But they used to like me better in the old days, when they
were getting paid by the word. I do have a very long name.”

Longevity is
something that Patrick knows all about. He has poured so much activity into his
74 years that it would fill most ordinary lives two or three times over. A
country man to his bones, he has served the Scottish NFU, the Scottish
Landowners Federation, the Deer Commission for Scotland, the Cumbrian NFU and
the Lake District Special Planning Board, not to mention his formative years as
a young shepherd, a rebellious student at Eton and Oxford, a soldier in the
Cameron Highlanders, and finally, a reluctant resident of Muncaster Castle,
where we meet today.

His recently published memoirs tell a colourful
tale. But first, an awkward subject to broach: on page 192 of his book, Patrick
recalls a trip to Russia in 1988. He writes: “Moscow was horrid. In the hotel a
wardress guarded each floor and as there was no loo paper I had to make do with
a copy of The Whitehaven News.”

I ask the only question that comes to
mind: was Copeland’s favourite weekly read suitably absorbent? “Well, it did
what was needed,” he replies. “I was very grateful.”

Back to a more
palatable subject: the memoirs. How long had it been in Patrick’s mind to commit
the story of his life to print?

“It hadn’t. I had no intention of writing
it, but I was gulled into doing it. The Memoir Club invited Phyllida, my wife,
and I to stay. We got there, had tea, dinner, a lovely night’s sleep, then
breakfast, then luncheon. I had always said No, but by the end of our stay I
felt morally obliged to give them what they wanted.”

The book took him
two years to write — all from memory, and all in longhand. It would have taken
just one, but for “an unfortunate collision with a chest of drawers” which left
him unable to sit at a desk for months.

He is happy with his version of
“an unimportant but highly entertaining life”. It is an occasionally lyrical,
often poetic memoir, which hums with the flavours of a countryside existence. It
is honest — sometimes bluntly so — but Patrick is careful to pull the occasional
punch, in the name of diplomacy.

His most telling blows are landed on the
politicians with whom he has crossed swords in a life spent standing up for his
countryside brethren. Here he is on Margaret Beckett, the current Minister for
Agriculture: “She’s an absolute pig of a woman. She doesn’t like animals at
all.” And on Jacques Chirac, once a farming minister himself: “Odious and
unimproved... a chauvinist to the tips of his toes.”

These are all the
words of a man who has frequently found himself at odds with authority and
expectation. As a boy, growing up in the Highlands, Patrick’s stepfather had
mapped out a future for him in a bathroom fittings firm in Surrey. No such luck:
the countryside had already claimed him. He went to Eton, where he developed the
love of poetry which he retains to this day, and then to Trinity College,
Oxford, where he joined numerous anti-establishment societies and earned a
second-class honours degree in history (“not worth the paper it’s written
on”).

While his education encouraged his creative tendencies, his
subsequent spell of national service taught him discipline, self-reliance and
the power of communication. He was posted to Austria for a year, and enjoyed it
— but hankered for a return to the countryside. As a young shepherd, farmer and
later champion of rural issues, it would become his classroom, his office and
his playing field.

It comes as little surprise to hear his withering
views on the bureaucratic stranglehold he believes the European Union exerts on
farmers today. “It is INTOLERABLE that people who ought to be working among
their stock are stuck in offices making sure they’ve dotted the i’s and crossed
the t’s, just so they can get three-quarters of their income from Brussels,” he
says. He does not envy politicians — “they have an awful job” — but could have
been one himself, had he pursued a fleeting teenage ambition to be Foreign
Secretary. Any regrets about that? “No. I would have killed someone! I think I
am of much more use on the edges, among the people.”

He says the
chairmanship of the Deer Commission was his most satisfying professional role.
“When I used to turn the car north on a Sunday, my spirits soared. I was
supposed to do two days a week but I did five. I was so happy.”

The other
strand of Patrick’s story leads us to Muncaster Castle. His marriage to Phyllida
Pennington in 1955 entailed a move to the castle which today is an acclaimed
tourist attraction. Back then, Patrick saw it only as a “gilded cage”, and
retreated to his beloved Scotland as frequently as possible.

Eventually,
they took up permanent residence in the building, and in 1982 they were the
first family since 1850 to live there all year round. Then, it was a crumbling
financial burden. Now, thanks to the work of Iona, the third of his four
daughters, and her husband Peter, it thrives. “They lead a most extraordinarily
hectic, stupid life,” Patrick says.

“The great, supreme enjoyment of
Muncaster today is the public. Last year we had 85,000 visitors, and only one in
10,000 is horrid. And I regret to say it’s usually male and it’s usually showing
off to its girlfriend.”

Even today, at 74, when he ought to be enjoying
the vast gardens at his sprawling home, he cannot resist weighing in with a few
words of support for the folk of West Cumbria; an area he originally regarded as
“a foreign land” but whose people he has grown to admire. On the thorny subject
of parking restrictions in Seascale, he positively thunders. “At the last
election, Mr Blair said decisions have to be taken much nearer the ground. But
what has happened? These people from the county council came down and said, ‘We
know what’s best for you, we’re going to paint yellow lines outside the
chemist’.

“It’s awful for business. They didn’t ask the local people, the
local people didn’t ask for it, and they even said they would raise the money
themselves to take those beastly lines away. But the council said it was a
principle, and they were going to leave them.”

Time is racing by. Before we wrap
up, how about a quick explanation of the most alarming revelation in his book —
the time Patrick became a centrefold in Japanese Playboy?

“Ah, that’s one
I sometimes bring out to shock the blue-rinse ladies,” he says. “I wasn’t really
expecting it. There was this journalist from Japan who came to investigate our
ghosts at Muncaster.

A few weeks later I was sent this magazine with
ladies wearing nothing at all, but a picture of yours truly in the centre pages
wearing his stepfather’s overcoat, with the headline ‘England
Freak’.

“Now I’m a totally committed Scot so that was terribly
insulting.”

There is plenty of life left yet in this old raconteur,
self-confessed “tinker” and enduring man of the soil. But when Father Time
eventually does start tapping his watch, we can be fairly sure that Patrick
Gordon-Duff-Pennington will go with a flourish.